Publisher's Note
South Korea, the United States, and Japan recently and simultaneously announced that a trilateral summit involving President Yoon Suk-yeol of Korea, President Joe Biden of the United States, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan will be held at Camp David, the U.S. Presidential Retreat, on Aug. 18. The leaders of the three nations have met during multilateral conferences in the past, but this is the first time they are gathering specifically for a trilateral summit.
Camp David is a historical landmark that has been used by U.S. Presidents to display a sense of intimacy with their invited guests and to forge important agreements that can change the course of world history. The first summit between President Eisenhower and Secretary Khrushchev of the Soviet Communist Party was held here in 1959 during the height of the Cold War. In 1978, the 10-day-long discussion at Camp David led by President Jimmy Carter culminated in the normalization of bilateral relations between Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt.
The fact that President Biden, who had not invited any foreign leaders to this location since taking office in 2021, has invited President Yoon and Prime Minister Kishida could symbolize the importance of cooperation between the three countries. Therefore, some observers suggest that this summit may have stemmed from President Biden’s intention to leapfrog the trilateral cooperation into a new dimension.
The organization of this trilateral summit was made possible by Korea’s proactive efforts to improve South Korea-Japan relations, one pillar of the trilateral cooperation structure. Unlike the previous Moon Jae-in administration, which allowed the deterioration of Korea-Japan relations, President Yoon, who took office in May last year, took a firm stance to normalize the frozen relations between the two countries and made a lightning visit to Japan in March of this year.
The Camp David summit comes amid recent U.S.-China technological tensions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, notably, the strengthened alliance between North Korea, China, and Russia in Northeast Asia. The close cooperation of the three countries – South Korea, the United States, and Japan - can cement the deterrence against North Korean nuclear and missile provocations, enhance cooperation for the reform of the global supply chain, and provide another key platform for the global solidarity of free and democratic nations, as President Yoon has emphasized since his presidential inauguration.
Based on such close coordination and cooperation, the leaders of Korea, the U.S., and Japan should closely discuss the U.S. government’s imminent export controls and outbound investment regulations against China in the high-tech sectors of artificial intelligence and semiconductors, minimizing any negative impacts that these regulations could have on the businesses and economies of the three countries. Furthermore, we hope that a conducive atmosphere will also be created to advance substantial cooperation in the aerospace and bio sectors, where the United States has an absolute advantage.